This invention relates to an optical reader for alphanumeric characters and more particularly to a method of processing character blocks, or groups of mutually contacting characters by using such an optical character reader.
When an optical alphanumeric character reader is used to read (scan) a document, problems arise if there are characters which touch each other. In such a situation, conventional optical character readers would attempt to identify characters by breaking up the character block where the histogram in the perpendicular direction to the line takes on a value smaller than a predetermined threshold value. Character blocks are frequently broken up incorrectly by this method and the overall efficiency of character identification becomes extremely low if there are many mutually contacting characters in the original. As a practical matter, detection of contacting characters itself is a very difficult problem.